Tag: technical details

In November 2007 EKA was announced, which is privately funded supercomputer. Eka, built by CRL, Pune is the world’s 4th fastest supercomputer, and the fastest one that didn’t use government funding. This is the same supercomputer referenced in Yahoo!’s recent announcement about cloud computing research at the Hadoop Summit. This article describes some of the technical details of Eka’s design and implementation.

My town – pune is home to some of the best supercomputing research and development facility into the area of software and other related technology. C-DAC (a scientific society of the Department of Information Technology, Government of India) has developed and supplied a range of high performance parallel computers, known as the PARAM series of supercomputers. Now CRL – a tata group company build the EKa one of the top 10 supercomputers in the world, Eka is the only system that was fully privately funded. All other systems used government money, so all of them are for captive use. This means that Eka is the only system in the top 10 that is available for commercial use without strings attached.

The computing infrastructure itself consists of:

1800 blades, 4 cores each. 3Ghz for each core.

HP SFS clusters

28TB memory

80TB storage. Simple SATA disks. 5.2Gbps throughput.

Lustre distributed file-system

20Gbps infiniband DDR. Eka was on the cutting edge of Infiniband technology. They sourced their infiniband hardware from an Israeli company and where amongst the first users of their releases – including beta, and even alpha quality stuff.

Multiple Gigabit ethernets

Linux is the underlying OS. Any Linux will work – RedHat, SuSe, your favorite distribution.